Re: teteX-TeXLive interoperability

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:

> On Mit, 23 Nov 2005, Frank Küster wrote:
>> Wasn't it consensus to also move all files to TEXMFDIST
>> (/usr/share/{texmf-tetex,texmf-texlive})? 
>
>
> Huuuuu?! This I missed then. But how do we solve the problems with order
> of pathes in TEXMF? Search path order? I think this produces more
> problems than it gains. Who wants to use teTeX and TeX live in parallel?

It was suggested in a thread that you can read at 

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.tetex/12055

The first message with subject "teTeX and TeX Live interoperability" is
currently unavailable, but the second one can be taken as a starter.

> Well, I remember there was a bit of discussion on this. But I would say
> this is not completely finished.

Obviously.

> But again, maybe I missed something important. If yes, please tell me
> quick as otherwise I will go for the sponsor these next few days. I have
> rebuild the packages with the correct tex-common dependency...

I think that this discussion does not necessarily mean to delay your
looking for a sponsor, and trying for an upload to experimental - we can
make the change later.

I hope I am still able to summarize this in a useful way - I'm a little
drunk, coming home from a good friend's PhD party[1], but this is what I
recollect.

It might be nice to have a texlive package installed on top of
tetex-{base,extra}, because some files are not provided by tetex - this
has already been pointed out by Ralf.  On the other hand, if teTeX is
released a couple of months after texlive, but you only prepare stable
texlive releases for Debian testing/stable[2], it could make sense to
have texlive installed to have all the (La)TeX packages needed, but try
to use it with teTeX's updated LaTeX formats, and maybe even
executables.

To be able to do that, we need the possibility to install as many of
both packages in parallel as possible.  

For the first of the two cases above, installing teTeX and TeXLive into
separate TEXMFDIST trees solves all problems, without introducing much
additional cost (only some search time if the other tree is available at
all).

For the second case, tetex-bin would have to depend on 

tetex-base | texlive-something

and whether this is feasible has to be tested.  But it will be
impossible if tetex-base and texlive-something conflict, in other words,
if both install files with the same name into the same tree.

Therefore I think that our design would be more open for future
improvements if we put teTeX's and TeXLives files into
TEXMFDIST=/usr/share/texmf-{tetex,texlive} (with user-configurable
order) and keep /usr/share/texmf as TEXMFMAIN - sorted between
TEXMFSYSVAR and TEXMFDIST. 

As a side effect, we would get a directory tree where Debian packages
can shadow teTeX's/TeXLive's files, namely TEXMFMAIN, without the need
to support one more tree, TEXMFSITE, as we had planned in the Policy
discussions (and already written in the Policy Draft).


I don't think there's any need to hurry from the point of view of
texlive entering the Debian archive, but we should try to get this clear
rather soon in order to give add-on packages' maintainers definitive
information. 

Regards, Frank


[1] it was really fun, and shows what good friends are worth - they even
organized a 2-people band to play on the 6th floor of the Basel
University Biocenter building.  I wouldn't have left and been writing
this mail if I hadn't booked measurement time on our single-molecule
microscope tomorrow...

[2] I don't know what your plans are, but I'd at least recommend to
stick to texlive versions that have been somehow tested and shown to not
break on usual systems; I don't know whether this is guaranteed through
most of texlive's release cycle, or only late in the "year".
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer